by Peter Quinn
“I’ll be here when you get back,” he said.
“It’ll be late. After eight.”
The cartman cracked his whip. The cart began to roll. Margaret sat. Dunne walked beside the cart. “No matter. I’ll be here. I’ve got plans for us.”
The cart gathered speed and made a fast turn onto Grand. Just before it went around the corner, she looked up and waved. A happy wave, Dunne thought.
He stood where he was. He would wait. However long. He had plans. Whatever it took.
JANUARY 16, 1864
The Towers of Manhattan
The dust is the dust, and forever
Receiveth its own;
But the dreams of a man or a people
Forever survive;
These builders, their crimes and their curses,
Their greed and their sordid endeavor,
Lie in the dust,
Dead in the dust,
But the vision, the dream, and the glory
Remain.
—Don Marquis
I
MORRISON FOSTER couldn’t sleep. He had been listening to Jane’s crying all day. Still was. It came through the door of the most expensive hotel in New York, a pine door shaved and shaped in Albany by a machine that could cut a door as thick or thin as was desired. The St. Nicholas had ordered its doors cut thin. The city’s first hotel to cost over a million dollars, but the owners had skimped on details such as doors and windows. Morrison was more annoyed by the thought of such disregard for the principles of solid construction than by Jane’s crying. She had been sobbing for days now. He was almost used to it. She started as soon as he came and gave her the news. Stephen is dead. She let out a cry and fell into his arms. Might have hurt herself badly if he hadn’t been there to catch her. And he had spared her the full tragedy. He didn’t have to. He could have been blunt, told her what else he had read in the personal and confidential message expressed to his office by the New York undertaker. Died by his own hand. But that wasn’t Morrison’s way. Never had been.
From the beginning Morrison had been responsible, serious, considerate of the feelings of others. They made the mess, he cleaned it up: Papa’s drinking, Momma’s moods, Stephen’s irresponsible, flighty, self-indulgent ways. William, a cousin whom Papa and Momma had raised as though he were their son, had left home in 1826, the year Stephen was born. William was often a help, but from a distance. It was Morrison who went to the door when the landlady was looking for the rent, when the grocer came with his unpaid bill, the tavern keeper, the shoemaker, the teacher looking for their sister, the minister, the immigrant with the ugly grin who said Stephen owed him for the performance of an unspeakable act, said it loudly, right there on the steps where the neighbors could hear.
Morrison threw off the covers. He took his robe off the chair, stuck one arm into the air, then the other, and slid the sleeves over them. He tied the robe around his middle, hugged himself. It was freezing. The hotel provided no heat after midnight; more skimping. He walked away from the thin door and the sound of Jane’s sobbing. The wind struck the window hard, rattling pane and sash. He pulled aside the drape. Below, on Broadway, the lampposts created small pools of light. A drunken man helped a woman over a heap of ash-blanketed snow. She fell, and he fell on top of her. Their high, happy laughter echoed in the street. They got up and struggled against the wind across the trafficless avenue, Broadway at 4:00 A.M., quiet and vacant at last.
Jane’s sobbing sounded more inconsolable than ever. At this point she is weeping for herself, Morrison thought. He had wept at the news of Stephen’s death, wept for almost an hour over Stephen’s life, the unfulfilled promise, the sins, the shortcomings. But long ago, as a child, he had studied the weeping of the bereaved, and it seemed to him that though a portion of their tears were for the deceased, most were caused by the sting of being reminded of a common oblivion, the emptiness and futility of resisting it, the certainty that all would be swallowed in the same conclusion, everything lost and gone forever. Though faith taught that this end was only another beginning, even faith, Morrison observed, trembled in the presence of death, wept, cowered, at least in those first glaring moments when the truth of human fragility was too fresh to be explained or softened by words, no matter how sacred their source.
Would Jane weep harder if she knew how Stephen died? Morrison wondered. He spared her the truth, as he had spared everyone. He took the undertaker’s message and burned it. He went to her home, wrapped Jane’s child in his arms, rocked her, reassured her, arranged for her lodging and care while they were away in New York. The child was distraught over her mother’s weeping. She had no memory of her father, and Morrison didn’t mention Stephen’s name to her. He held her small hand, patted it. “Momma has lost a dear friend. That is why she weeps. She grieves over a friend’s death. There, there, child.”
Morrison arranged all the details of their journey, or at least saw to it that William Millar, his secretary, did. As manager of the Juniata Iron Works and as brother of the late William Foster, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Morrison was extended every possible courtesy by the lines they traveled to New York. They left Pittsburgh in the morning, via a mail train, in a closed compartment of their own. Lunch was brought to them. Jane ate nothing. She sobbed incessantly. Morrison enjoyed his food, but the closer they drew to their destination, the more he worried that a crowd of New York journalists lay in wait for them at the terminal in Jersey City. One or two might be bribed into silence, but as a pack the smell of scandal made them implacable. There was no one waiting for them on the platform except the clerk from the railroad’s New York office, who saw them to the ferry and said that a coach would meet them on the other side and take them to the St. Nicholas, where arrangements had already been made. All went smoothly. They arrived on the 15th, just after dark. The maître d’hôtel met them at the desk and escorted them directly to the dining room. The hotel table was as grand as ever. Five courses were on the evening’s card, beginning with shrimp-and-asparagus soup. They had barely begun to sip it when Jane had another fit of crying. The maître d’hôtel was most understanding. “The war has caused such tears to be shed far and wide,” he said. Morrison put a gold coin in the man’s hand and nodded, as though the war were the reason Jane was dressed in widow’s weeds.
They ate no breakfast the next morning. They left the hotel and entered a waiting coach that took them to the undertaker’s. Morrison was glad for the harshness of the weather, the drab skies and ice-tipped winds that had the whole city traveling with collars up, mufflers wrapped tightly about the face, hats down over the eyes. There was no one at the entrance to the undertaker’s. They hurried out of the coach and inside. Winterbottom, the undertaker, was waiting for them in the vestibule. He shook Morrison’s hand, bowed to Jane, and escorted them into a dignified oak-paneled room with large chairs upholstered in green leather. It seemed to Morrison that it might as well have been a banker’s office as an undertaker’s. An attendant took their coats. Jane sat and cried into her handkerchief. The attendant returned with a silver tray on which were two cups of hot cocoa and a bowl of whipped cream. Morrison was about to take a cup when Winterbottom motioned for him to follow. They went out a side door, down a stone corridor, into a small cold antechamber.
Winterbottom rubbed his hands. “Mr. Foster,” he said, “this is a most delicate matter.”
“You have handled it well,” Foster said.
“The man who brought your brother to the hospital implied he might go to the police. He said that, well, the gash in your brother’s throat wasn’t the accidental result of falling upon a piece of crockery. He said that it was deliberately self-inflicted; that your, brother told him so; and that it was a civic duty to report such an act to the authorities.”
“Where is this fellow now?”
“He has taken a trip to Rochester. His expenses were all paid, and he was given something additional. I saw to it.”
“I’m deeply grateful.” Morr
ison’s words turned to puffs of steam. He shivered. “May I see my brother’s body?”
“Of course,” Winterbottom said. He didn’t move. “But it wasn’t that fellow alone, I’m afraid. There was the coroner as well, and a nosing journalist from one of the city’s most disgusting sheets. Showed up here several days ago making inquiries. Threatened to run a story about ‘the songster’s suicide’—his phrase exactly—and I had no choice. He had to be paid. It was a substantial sum.”
“You did well and shall be remunerated in full, as I said in my note. You received it, didn’t you?”
“Most definitely, but I was just making sure, Mr. Foster. I wish I could report that in the shadow of death all men shun duplicity or insincerity, but such, sir, has not been my experience.”
“Same in every business,” Morrison said.
After he saw Stephen’s body, Morrison fetched Jane and escorted her in. She fell to her knees and prayed a long time.
The shroud was drawn up to Stephen’s chin, leaving only his face in view. Morrison was prepared to restrain her if she attempted to lift the sheet and expose the gruesome blue-and-yellow gash across Stephen’s throat, the thick, irregular stitches adding to the horror, but after gazing at Stephen awhile she turned away and put her head on Morrison’s shoulder, and he led her out. She had never questioned Morrison’s explanation of her husband’s death—that he died in a fall—and didn’t do so now.
Morrison left Jane in the oak-paneled room and returned alone to Winterbottom’s private office. He took out a blank bank draft and laid it on the desk. “What is the full amount for your services?” he asked.
Winterbottom handed him a bill. There were no items, just a total.
“Does this include shipment of the body?”
“Everything is included, Mr. Foster.”
Morrison filled in the draft and signed it. He handed it to Winterbottom, who stared at it a moment before folding it and putting it in his pocket.
“What should I do with the possessions that were on your brother’s body?” Winterbottom said.
“What is there?”
“His clothing.”
“Dispose of it as you wish.”
“And this.” Winterbottom handed Morrison a small purse. Morrison snapped open the clasp. It contained a handful of copper coins and a folded scrap of paper. Morrison took out the paper. It looked as though it had been torn from the back of an envelope. On it were penciled five words: Dear friends and gentle hearts.
“This I will keep,” Morrison said.
*
Morrison took the coverlet from the bed and put it around his shoulders. He sat at the desk by the window and lit the oil lamp. He removed a thick folder from his briefcase. If he couldn’t sleep, he would work. He had turned many a restless night to his advantage in this fashion, harnessing the anxiety or dread that drove him from bed to a useful purpose.
This past June, as Lee had approached Harrisburg with the obvious intent to destroy the Pennsylvania Railroad’s bridge over the Susquehanna and break the link with the West, Morrison had lost all desire for sleep. He had worked night after night, ceaselessly reading maintenance reports and requisitions, until he had cleared his desk entirely of any business and started on his personal correspondence. He had written a long-overdue reply to Stephen’s request for yet another loan. Now Morrison felt a mixture of regret and sadness at the memory of how he had turned his brother away. It was the last note he had ever sent Stephen, the final words between them.
Morrison opened the folder that had been given him by a director of the Pennsylvania. It contained a confidential account of the Pennsylvania’s negotiations with an assortment of New Jersey railroads to unite their various tracks into a single consolidated line from Philadelphia to Jersey City. It would be managed, of course, by the Pennsylvania. Tantalus’s prize was at last in reach: the fruit-laden bough of New York Harbor, an endless supply of freight and immigrants to be hauled west, an insatiable demand for the raw materials of the interior to be consumed or exported. There were ten pages of item-by-item estimates for the lading that could be expected from a consolidated line, ten more on the specific investments in track and equipment required to create such a line. An engineer’s report was appended. Morrison skimmed over it to the last paragraph, which described the Jersey City terminal he and Jane had passed through yesterday. “Today it is nothing more than an oversized barn with a galvanized iron roof,” the engineer had written. “In the event of consolidation, a grander, more permanent terminal should be contemplated, a structure that would testify to the power and position of the Pennsylvania.”
Morrison pushed aside the folder. There was no sound from Jane’s room. She was either asleep or giving her grief a rest. He reached into the pocket of his robe and took out Stephen’s purse, opened it, and withdrew the scrap of paper. Dear friends and gentle hearts. He wished for a moment he had some of Stephen’s talent that he might compose an ode or song that used these words to open a tribute to his brother. But his abilities had never extended to the poetical or musical. “Morrison is the practical one, the Foster with sense,” his father said on more than one occasion, said it with a half smile on his face, as if amused.
Muffled sounds came from outside. Morrison stood and pulled back the drapes. It was dawn. The traffic was flowing once again, vehicles and pedestrians moving resolutely up and down the avenue. The relentless bustle of New York. He ran his hand across the sill. It was cracked and peeling, covered with soot. Poorly installed, poorly maintained. The hotel was barely ten years old and was already falling apart. Everything did unless you stayed on top of it, paid constant attention, repairing, cleaning, rebuilding. Poets and artists never worried about such matters. They smiled and sang, and left the work to the practical ones, ironmongers and smiths, merchants and businessmen, workmen and engineers, men of sense and responsibility. Morrison stuck the scrap of paper into the folder to mark the engineer’s report. He would refer to it again, he decided. On the journey home, he would take a careful look at the Jersey City terminal, make some calculations, draw a preliminary sketch. It must be a useful, efficient structure, but the engineer was right. It should also be large and magnificent, able to withstand the assault of time, a monument to lasting things.
EPILOGUE
History isn’t a record, a factual, objective, reasoned account of what occurred. History is a collection of remnants, shards, fragments. Make of it what you will. History is detritus.
—Audley Ward
THAT SUMMER OF 1863 is etched indelibly into memory. It commenced with the news of Lee’s movement north, which, to appropriate Dr. Johnson’s phrase, “concentrated wonderfully” the attention of the nation. Unlike New York City, however, our town never harbored doubts about the outcome. We all believed that right would triumph, as it did, and the threat of a Confederate invasion led not to panic but to a new burst of patriotic fervor. A wave of volunteers flowed into the recruiting hut beside the town hall. My eldest brother, Frederick, who was nineteen at the time, was among them. How I remember the day he and his comrades departed! They marched in loose formation to the terminal on Newark Avenue with the German Society Band at their head. We small boys trailed behind. Our hearts beat with the knowledge that these warriors were not the stuff of distant legends or ancient history, but our brothers and cousins and uncles, and though they arrived too late to participate in the glorious triumph at Gettysburg, we were sure that the very word of their approach helped put Lee to flight.
Two events from that time stand out in my mind. The first was a murder that took place in the old Elysian Fields, the report of which spread like cholera through the town, striking terror everywhere. The sacred precincts of play had become home to the sin of Cain! Outside the valiant contest of war, and sometimes even in it, the taking of any life is a gruesome transgression, but when the killing is murder, and not murder of the ordinary sort, a single shot, a solitary stab, but a brutal and ferocious assault that leaves the corpse unr
ecognizable, an icy chill enters the human heart. Of such a type was the murder in the fields.
For me it was made all the more disturbing by the fact that the corpse of the slain man rested in the basement of our house, in which my father maintained the town coroner’s office. I was cursed with nightmares and shivered in my bed. My mother came and stroked my head. She said that the slain man as well as his slayer were undoubtedly Yorkers. She meant to comfort me, but instead inspired the fear that lurking in every corner of the night were Yorkers of murderous intent. My sleep remained disturbed!
As great as was my dread, it was insufficient to keep me or my comrades away from the very fields that haunted our dreams and that our parents had expressly forbidden us to visit. Drawn rather than repelled by the prospect of danger, as boys will always be, and undeterred by our parents’ threats of punishment, we ventured into the Fields, to the very area in which the murder had occurred.
The hour was near dusk. The shadows in the woods turned deep and ominous. Running up the path to Sybil’s Cave, we panted from a mixture of fear and physical exertion. We tarried at the cave’s entrance nary a minute but flew back down the path, each inspired by the desire not to be the last in the pack. I led the way, running as with winged feet. I hurtled so fast that I was unable to negotiate a turn and, sliding on a muddy patch, crashed into the brush. I scrambled frantically to my feet. As I did, my hand closed quite fortuitously about the stem of a baseball bat, as though Fate itself had decreed that I should not miss it. With bat in hand, I resumed the race, eventually regaining my place in the lead.
It was not until we reached the halo of a streetlamp at the fringes of the fields that our anabasis came to a halt. Delighted with our safe return, we joked and laughed, pretending we had never been frightened at all, and I, quite proud of my find, held it up for the others to see. There, in the glow of gaslight, Ken Curtin, a tall red-haired lad who claimed to be Welsh but whom we mockingly accused of being Irish, noticed a clump caught in a fracture at the thick end of the bat. He reached up and pulled it loose. He held it for a moment in his hand. Horror crossed his face. “My God!” he said with alarm. “This seems a piece of skull and human hair!” Suddenly the shadows filled with Yorkers. Ken dropped the bat, and we resumed our race.
